Jerry J. Min

Do governments treat foreign investors fairly when enforcing regulations? Politicians may relax enforcement for foreign-owned firms that threaten exit. They may also favor domestic firms. I argue that, when politicians instead value regulatory stringency and are not protectionist, foreign-owned firms can still face discrimination: an information-driven bias by bureaucratic regulators. Bureaucrats enforce regulations under imperfect information about compliance. External ownership—foreign or domestic non-local—may signal unfamiliarity with local regulations and noncompliance. Regulators therefore target externally owned firms for extra scrutiny, such as inspections, though not harsher penalties. I examine U.S. environmental regulation, where states conduct most enforcement. I link enforcement records to ownership data on 2.4 million plants since 1989. Plants face more scrutiny after being acquired by foreign and domestic out-of-state companies, not by in-state ones. This bias concentrates in Democratic strongholds, where politicians value regulatory stringency. Penalty decisions show no ownership bias but favor campaign donors. Bureaucrats’ information-driven bias, not protectionism, drives discrimination against foreign investors.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) and migrant workers earn income abroad taxable by both home and host states. To avoid double taxation, states have signed over 4,500 bilateral tax treaties (BTTs). They limit the host state’s taxing right on each overlapping base, leaving the remainder to the home state. Many argue that BTTs increasingly restrict host taxing rights, eroding developing countries’ ability to tax MNCs. Why do states accept lower host taxing rights? I argue that democracies and left-wing governments concede selectively, to attract foreign firms’ business and investment. I construct the first global dataset of BTT contents, coding 24 provisions in over 4,000 treaties and 300 amendment protocols to quantify host taxing rights across tax bases. Democracies across the ideological spectrum, and left-wing nondemocracies, grant lower rights—but only on income and payments generated exclusively by foreign firms, not on other bases such as foreign individuals’ income or domestic firms’ outgoing payments. The rise of MNCs’ tax avoidance thus reflects uneven government preferences, not merely uniform pressure from the treaty regime, and the left’s conventional preference for domestic taxation does not extend to global taxation.

Scholars frequently use nationalism to explain opposition to globalization but overlook nationalism’s multiple dimensions. I distinguish national pride from national chauvinism and argue that they are distinct predispositions with contrasting effects: national chauvinism drives opposition to globalization, whereas national pride fosters support. I examine all public opinion surveys measuring the two nationalist predispositions alongside globalization preferences, covering 46 developed and developing countries from 1994 to 2025. Higher-income and more educated individuals exhibit weaker national chauvinism but similar or greater national pride. Those high in national pride but low in national chauvinism are consistently more supportive of free trade, foreign direct investment, immigration, and international organizations, even after adjusting for economic self-interest. An original U.S. survey experiment and U.K. survey evidence illuminate the mechanism: chauvinism heightens, while pride dampens, sensitivity to a foreign country’s relative gains from globalization because the two predispositions differ in their orientations toward group status.